If anyone has any other suggestions for visualisation or anything else to do with this then get in touch. (just decode the really strong algorithm used for my e-mail address above...)

CORBA/Perl

So I finally got off my arse and started on this. I've got a Parse::RecDescent parser up and running on 90% of the IDL grammar at the moment. The other 10% I currently don't care about and will add later.

My main task now is to generate a nice syntax tree representation that can be used to generate all of the types of output needed like stubs, skels, helper classes etc.

After that I'll start on the ORB proper and then the POA classes. I really hope I have enough time to get this going within the year end.

Work

Latest hack at work is an object-query language. You provide constraints in terms of objects and their members and you get a list of object references back.

It's quite simple but I find it very cool. I might try to generalise this and go and make that Perl Object Persistence framework I keep on musing about. Nearly got there once upon a long time ago but kind of got stuck on how to query the damn thing. Here is my answer...

So I'm hoping that, like me, people read lots of random diary entries. I'll just assume people read diary entries for now, it helps to think that someone is actually reading what you write, although I have to say the simple act of dumping thoughts out is useful.

CORBA/Perl

So, I've been thinking about this some more and I'm wondering how to go about finding some company/organisation that would sponsor me to go off and write a pure-perl CORBA implementation.

A friend of mine suggested getting a plan together to define the project, estimated schedules etc. Personally I like the idea but I would like to find out if there are any such organisations first, before spending time generating that kind of document.

London

Hmm, weather cooling off today, thunder is promised. As long as we get lightning too I don't mind. There's nothing worse than thunder and gray skies without a bit of lightning.

So, Java eh? Pretty stinky stuff when it comes to library versions multiple VMs and trying to remember how to start up a program that requires six billion jar files.

I currently have a working Perl system to handle all of the sticky stuff that I want to shove onto CPAN. Of course you need Perl, but everyone should have it laying about on their machines if they don't already. I am at the moment cleaning up some of the issues that it raises with security and such like.

Briefly, the system takes a config for the system and a config for the application, constructs classpaths for you, figures out which interpreter it should be using and then goes and runs your app. It can also do kinky things like make sure that certain environment variables are set for particualr VMs, or add certain command line arguments to the program by default.

Probably doesn't make a huge amount of sense, one of the other things I'm doing is documenting everything, which, whilst not the greatest job in the world, is completely necessary. The number of system that are unusable because only the developers actually know how to use them is amazing. Look at the whole J2EE mess.

Not sure if it should go into CPAN however since it isn't just a set of modules but also a set of scripts that use them to do the business. Hmm. I'll let PAUSE tell me off if they don't want it up there I suppose.

Heat

Too hot to work here in London at the moment, temp is around 31C and the AC machines here are little more than underpowered fans.

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New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
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